Kwame’s mobile social networking

Former Yahoo engineer-designer Kwame Ferreira compares the current mobilizing of social networking to when cavepeople discovered that the fires over which they'd do their social networking could actually be taken from cave to cave with them, as described in the mobileCampLondon blog. Picture fire-enabled social networking on the fly. So these days, we have online social networking, which has gone from newsgroups and Internet Relay Chat to Web chatrooms and discussion boards to social-networking sites currently moving on to the phone (e.g., see PC World on Google's acquisition of mobile-socializing company Zingku, and T-Mobile just joined Helio and AT&T in providing MySpace Mobile, Red Herring reports). So we're seeing the move from accessing Web-based social networking with our phones to phone-based social networking (mobile phone-enabled instead of mobile fire-enabled). But that's not the ultimate to Kwame. "What’s the killer app? Well, one that marries the two: crossing Web and mobile data and allowing it to integrate with 'real life'" – the blogger describes something kind of like being able to see each other's social-networking profile (with their permission) in real life, while walking around. It sounds more akin to the current GPS-enabled mobile social networking we're seeing with loopt.com, by which friends (hopefully not strangers) can pinpoint each other's physical locations with their phones for real-life socializing. This is GPS-enhanced mobile-enabled social networking more than phone-based social networking, because it gets people together in person, but not Kwame's killer app yet because it generally gets together people who already know each other. It doesn't so much introduce people to each other before they get-together in a physical location. See the difference? If not, your kids probably do – I hope they're willing to explain. [See also the Boston Globe on "social networking breaking free from the PC."]